Monday, September 19, 2011

Reminder for Zalamea Seminar at JVE

SEMINAR: FERNANDO ZALAMEA, “SHEAF LOGIC AND
PHILOSOPHICAL SYNTHESIS”

TIME: SEPT. 29TH, 14h – 17h

LOCATION: AUDITORIUM, JAN VAN EYCK ACADEMIE,
MAASTRICHT

The
point of this seminar is not only to acquaint us with the vibrant landscape of
contemporary mathematics – and the field of sheaf logic and category theory, in
particular – but to show us how this landscape’s powerful new concepts can be
deployed in the fields of philosophy and cultural production. Its aim is
nothing less than to ignite a new way of thinking about universality and synthesis
in the absence of any absolute foundation or stable, pre-given totality – a
problem that mathematics has spent the better part of the last fifty years
thinking its way through, and which it has traversed by means remarkable series
of conceptual inventions – a problem which has also animated philosophical
modernity and its contemporary horizon. This marks something of a variation on
the theme of antagonism and technique
that Versus has taken as its focus for the coming year: rather than seek to
fragment philosophical concepts through the prism of non-philosophical
disciplines – understood as something like “conditions for philosophy” – we
will mobilize mathematical concepts and techniques to synthesize and render continuous what philosophy has fragmented.
The crisp dichtomies of realism versus
idealism, form versus content, the
static versus the dynamic, and so on,
are skillfully woven into a complex oscillating fabric that, far from obscuring
the polarities in a night in which all cows are black, unleashes a living swarm
of powerful conceptual nuances and distinctions from what was, in retrospect, a
lazy taxonomy. This labour of synthesis, itself, demonstrates how far real mathematics – the living
mathematical practice of the present age – outstrips anything dreamt of in our
philosophy.

Our
guide in this endeavour will be Fernando Zalamea,
a Columbian mathematician, philosopher and novelist whose work seeks to explore
the life of contemporary mathematics while redeploying its concepts and forces beyond
their native domain. In an incessant, pendular motion, he weaves the warp of
post-Grothendieckian mathematics through a heterogeneous weft of materials
drawn from architecture and fiction, sculpture and myth, poetry and music.

We
see Zalamea’s work as expressing an all-too-rare effort to subject philosophy
to the condition of mathematics, and
his degree of immersion and care for
the latter is perhaps unmatched by any since Albert Lautman. If Lautman was
Deleuze’s Virgil through the rings of modern mathematics, we may count on
Zalamea’s work to guide us through the contemporary mathematics that we believe
any philosophy awake to its own times must traverse. Just as analytic
philosophy emerged from the shockwaves of the explosion of classical logic and
set theory onto the scene in the early 20th century, the conceptual
force of mathematics after Grothendieck holds the potential to spawn a new,
‘synthetic’ vision of mathematically-conditioned philosophy for the present
age, one which Zalamea foreshadows under the rubrics of transitory ontology, epistemological sheaves, and universal pragmaticism. Though the
seminar will not be fail to be of interest to mathematicians and logicians, who
we think will find even their own terrain illuminated by Zalamea’s insights and
mediations, we hasten to point out that the
seminarwill presuppose no prior
knowledge of advanced mathematics.

We
ask that the seminar participants read the excerpt from Versus Laboratorian
Luke Fraser’s translation of Zalamea’s Filosofía
Sintética de las Matemáticas Contemporánes (Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics), which is
forthcoming from Urbanomic Press and which we have provided for the seminar
participants in draft form. Like all Versus Laboratory seminars, this will be a
fully participatory event, with plenty of time for a detailed discussion of the
concepts and problems at stake.